BBC2’s poetry night chugs along nicely

Kate Tempest, who performed live on the BBC2 poetry evening.
Photograph: Andrew Benge/Getty

Well, will it keep the Bake Off audience tuned in after Jo Brand’s spin-off cake show? Or even win over a few X Factor fans from ITV? Probably not, but BBC2 took its much-heralded first step to reclaim its cultural territory with a themed poetry night to mark National Poetry Day on Saturday.

Part of a plan for the channel to represent the arts at a higher-brow – but more audible – pitch, the evening officially began at 9pm with a salute to WH Auden’s 80-year-old film Night Mail, a celebrated poetic paean to the train service that took the post up north through the dark. This time, a succession of contemporary poets were invited to board a Virgin Pendolino (a name crying out for versification) and write fresh lines in response to the passengers making a morning journey with them from Euston to Glasgow.

But before the whistle blew to start this avowedly modern adventure, there was a (repeat of a) rather more run-of-the-mill, comfortable BBC2 documentary in which the chef Rick Stein explained his strong feeling for John Betjeman’s poetry – knocking all the nasty edges off the late laureate’s work in the process. This gave the evening a kind of false start that only proves how hard it is to neatly package art for TV.

Then, at last, we were heading off on Sir Richard Branson’s train, with narrator Maxine Peake waving us off at the London terminus with bridging stanzas written by Sean O’Brien.

BBC2 clearly hoped, in his words, that “a singing line would convey an epic”, and in its best moments Railway Nation gave a real sense of how a traveller can “vanish off the clock” on a long rail journey. On the first leg to Milton Keynes, Sabrina Mahfouz talked of breaking away from London’s powerful pull and noted the train passenger’s rediscovery that it is “nice to look at something that can’t look back”. The same might be said, of course, of the appeal of watching telly, and most of the time there was not enough push-back in this film to shake BBC2 viewers out of their reveries.

Given the place that railways currently have in the national discourse, following Jeremy Corbyn’s recent spat with Virgin and the industrial disputes affecting commuters on Southern trains, it was all rather anodyne and dreamy compared to Auden’s pacey hymn to human endeavour.

The poets all seemed at home on the train, not surprising perhaps since so statistically few are said to drive cars. Michael Symmons Roberts had some nice lines, contrasting the pulse of Auden’s train with the “long drawn breath” of an intercity service as he and his fellow travellers ran “our finger up the spine of England”. Gradually the life stories of those in the carriages emerged, bringing with them melancholy themes of anxiety and loss.

In the end the film tried to do too much. The touching narratives provided by the assorted, non-lyrical civilians on their way to see aged parents, or lost children, or revisit happy holiday memories, might have been more poetic left to stand alone. It was the train guard of 28 years’ service, after all, who offered one of the most memorable lines, explaining that working for Virgin was like being married: “You love it, you hate it and then you miss it.”

Liz Berry took us whimsically up to Crewe, calling on “little horses” to bless everyone, from “Mikhail on the early shift” to the “blokes at the breakers yard”. Andrew McMillan and Imtiaz Dharker took us in turn on up through Carlisle to Glasgow before “the long embrace of wheel and rail” loosened its grip.

The BBC’s famous founding mission “to educate, entertain and inform” does not mention providing Art, although Art can do all three on a good day. But good TV is an art in itself, at least in the sense of being a craft. Let’s hope the bolder BBC2 arts programming now promised, like the narrative poem Let Them Eat Chaos from Kate Tempest, which followed Railway Nation, will have a clear sense of whether it is intended as a platform for artists, or is actually aspiring to be art.